Post Live Letter Dancer Actions / Speculation

Action Descriptions from the Liveletter



	Standard Finish appears to give deal some damage as well as give a damage up buff as well as the “Espirit” buff. This buff probably is what allows you to build your Espirit gauge when a buffed dancing partner uses a weaponskill. Also, interestingly when the damage is dealt to the enemy, the name of the attack is “Double Standard Finish”, so possibly the number of steps you do changes the amount of damage? When standard step fails, it does not apply the buffs, but I don’t know if it changes the potency of the attack or allows it at all.
	All of Dancer’s area of effect attacks are small point blank circle areas, so for the most of single target attacks it appears that you’ll be able to stay at range and only move in for AOE (unless you have to use the AOE skills as part of the rotation, which seems to be the case for Rising Windmill at the very least, which after using Flourish could be useful as a free chance to get a feather.


	Flourishing Fan Dance likely changes Fan Dance to a different ability that can’t be assigned to the hotbar, similar to how actions become Heated on MCH but not really because that’s gauge dependant so nevermind. At the moment Fan Dance seems fairly weak for something you have to build a resource to use (to be fair it’s a free 150 potency oGCD so it’s still better to go for the fans even if it does nothing) but of course Flourishing Fan Dance should do something. It’s also odd since the skills that the Flourishing buffs allow are the ones to give you the feathers required for Fan Dance, so maybe when you use a fan you have a 50% chance to get it back.


	This is the screenshot I grabbed from the Live Letter but I believe it reads: Delivers an attack with a potency of 300 for the first enemy and 50% less for all remaining enemies. Additional Effect: 50% chance of granting a Fourfold Feather to self Can only be executed while under the effect of Flourishing Shower.
	zoom zoom
	AOE fan dance (not a combo from Fan Dance I).
	Effectively 400 potency as it goes out once for you and your partner but when the tooltip says nearby they really meant it. 3y is half the radius of a cure III, so I don’t see this particularly being useful for party wide healing except for the most ridiculous of optimisation. It’s probably more like a Second Wind or something, but if the potency works like Second Wind this is not healing a lot. During the Live Letter they did say that damage calculations have been changed, so this may be better than it seems but it doesn’t look very good.
	This also means Bard is losing Tactician, as TP doesn’t exist anymore, so it likely reduces damage. Troubadour is likely simplified to just be a standard damage reduction rather than depending on the song being played.
	The effects shown here are Saber Dance, a self buff that can be shared with your partner, Curing Waltz, which doubles the healing, and Standard Finish. This means that Technical Finish can’t be shared. Actually, when watching the Live Letter, it appears that both Standard Finish and Technical Finish can be shared (the red flower buff is technical) and they both give damage up.

	In the Live Letter, Technical Finish appears to deal damage as well as give a 15 second damage up buff. Technical Finish’s attack also appears to be called Quadruple Technical Finish, which gives evidence to the fact that damage may scale if the dance is failed.
	This allows you to use the 4 skills that give you feathers as well as the Flourishing Fan Dance (which might do that as well but who knows). The use of this is very dependant on how that works, but this seems like a consistent way of gaining a burst of the feathers every 60 seconds. You could probably line this up with Trick Attack if it still exists but I doubt it.
	this is a big number and good AOE.
	For this ability you need to have the party stood together in Cure III range so it seems like Improvisation will require some planning, but at the potency of Devilment it could be worth it. The duration here also says 15s, which I think might be considerably higher than you would have to stand there with a full party stacked. Since you have to stand still and use no actions, the bar would probably have to fill in a few seconds for it to be worth it.
the red dance step

Job Gauge

	I would guess that these green things on the job gauge are the Fourfold Feathers, which you can probably get up to 4 of. These are granted by a 50% proc on either Reverse Cascade or Fountainfall. These skills are able to be used after getting a proc from the normal skill, then the feathers can then be used on the Fan Dance skills. Each fan dance skill has a chance to activate Flourishing Fan Dance, however there’s nothing in the Live Letter about what this does because feathers are never proc’d. They may change to an enhanced form by replacing the first fan dances on the hotbar.
	This is the Espirit Gauge, and this is built up when your buffed dancing partner uses a weaponskill. For this reason, probably 5.0 monk will be the best dancing partner, since it now has 4 greased lightning stacks and Yoshida said in the Liveletter that it is much faster, therefore more weaponskills and more of the gauge built up. It looks like the only use for this is Devilment at 50 espirit, which, fair enough it’s 600 potency.
	This gauge shows how long your Standard Step buffs last for. Standard Step has a 30sec recast time, but it might not be optimal to use it every 30 seconds based on how much damage Standard Finish does, instead only using it to refresh the buff.
	The top part of the gauge above changes to this when dancing. This is the order you have to execute the steps, and it seems to be random each time.

Theories on DNC rotation

Dancer’s standard combo should be:
Cascade > Fountain > (if proc) Reverse Cascade > (if proc) Fountainfall

Dancer’s AOE standard combo is the exact same sort of thing:

Windmill > Bladeshower > (if proc) Rising Windmill > (if proc) Bloodshower

In this disgusting diagram, you can see that the chances of:

2 Feathers = 6.25%

1 Feather = 37.5%

0 Feathers = 56.25%

and

4 GCDs, 1300pt, 325 avg = 25%

3 GCDs, 950pt, 316.6 avg = 25%

3 GCDs, 900pt, 300 avg = 25%

2 GCDs, 550pt, 275 avg = 25%

Therefore on average you’re doing 304.16pt per action in the combo. There’s quite a high chance that this information is useless, but since we don’t know how the potency of Standard Finish if it is below or not too far above 300pt you are better off using the combo, since this also gives you feathers which are hopefully useful based on whatever Flourishing Fan Dance does.

Obviously you want to be keeping Standard Finish buffs up constantly, although it’s unclear if it’s every 30 seconds or right before they fall of at 60 seconds based on damage. Your Technical Dance should be used whenever it comes up for sure, so the 15s damage buff is not wasted.

What I don’t know

Potencies of each of the dance attacks, if they scale, how does that work.
What does Flourishing Fan Dance do.
I also think that they said “skills” when talking about the espirit gauge but there’s only 1 that uses it, which is a tiny bit odd but I don’t think they could have hidden away any other use of the gauge, so I still think that’s it.
Does it use bard gear (i mean it will but it’s unconfirmed. dancers don’t sneak around they aren’t ninjas. right? right? help)

Conclusion

Pretty sure this looks to be a meta job, I think content is going to be designed with having a ranged DPS in mind due to that damage down thing, but of course it depends on BRD and MCH’s kit which we don’t know yet. However, the amount of just damage up buffs and crit buffs and everything means that it probably won’t be throwing out a whole lot of damage but with all the support and buffs that it has, dancer seems very good. Also it looks very fun I am very excited to play the dancing job.